Helen Van Dongen - Writer

Editor.
Nationality:
Dutch.
Born:
Amsterdam, 5 January 1909.
Family:
Married Kenneth Durant, 1950.
Career:
1928—assisted Joris Ivens on
The Bridge
, and later works; 1930—studied soundtrack recording and editing,
Tobis Klangfilm Studios, and also studied at UFA, Berlin;
1934—assistant and observer at Joinville Studios, Paris, studied at
the Academy of Cinematography, Moscow, under Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and
Vertov, 1934–36, and observer in Hollywood studios, 1936; late
1930s—worked as producer on education films; abortive job as editor
on film project of Nelson Rockefeller, the co-ordinator of Inter-American
Affairs, during World War II; another abortive project as deputy
commissioner for the Netherlands East Indies (Ivens was to serve as
Commissioner); 1950—retired upon marriage.

On VAN DONGEN: articles—

Films and Filming
(London), December 1961.

Ivens, Joris, in
The Camera and I
, New York, 1969.

Skoop
(Amsterdam), November 1978.

* * *

There is a famous story recounted by
Time
magazine's Richard Corliss in a 1980 essay on Robert Flaherty.
Helen Van Dongen, working as the editor of the filmmaker's
The Land
, showed him a sequence she had cut together and he fervently disapproved.
A few days later she screened the same sequence for him and he said
"Now you've got it." Van Dongen proved ably up to the
task of working with Flaherty, transmuting the director's seemingly
random and chaotic footage into, as Corliss writes, "a brilliant
'as told to' autobiography. If [Flaherty's] spirit
informed their project, then [Van Dongen's] will gave its final
form."

In the truest spirit of the title, Van Dongen was an editor whose
techniques, honed by early work with Joris Ivens, extended beyond mere
physical assemblage and continuity supervision to thoughtful documentary
theory and to complex and creative sound work. In Flaherty's
Louisiana Story
, in which she served as editor and as associate producer, she worked
closely with composer Virgil Thompson in creating specific themes for
characters and sequences, and manipulated the sound track by disassembling
sounds and then reconfiguring them: a scene on a bridge at night may
contain up to 20 separate sounds (some of which were not endemic to the
location) or a human scream could be a fusing of a dozen voices. Her
exhaustive analysis of the film can be found in
The Technique of Film Editing
and is a fascinating look not only at how sequences were structured and
sound was used, but also the reasons why—both the pragmatic and the
dramatic.

Though her two World War II compilation documentaries,
Russians at War
and
News Review No. 2
were well received, having been compared favorably with the
World at War
series by Frank Capra, her two films with Flaherty have proven her most
enduring works. Her extensive diaries of the production histories of
The Land
and
Louisiana Story
provide a telling memoir of working on location and in the editing room
with the often opaque and stubborn Flaherty (he referred to her as his
"Dutch mule"), while also revealing a uniquely productive
and successful collaboration. Though certainly a tempestuous relationship,
it was never overtly adversarial; in fact when Van Dongen had to trick
Flaherty into providing the narration for
The Land
because no narrator could capture his intonations (she earlier had
corralled Ernest Hemingway into reciting his own written words on
Ivens's
The Spanish Earth
), he was by all accounts incensed, but later conceded Van Dongen was
right because it benefited the film. While their goals were the same, Van
Dongen admitted her greatest challenge was in having to continually
interpret and reinterpret Flaherty's admittedly elusive vision
(which often led to gross continuity gaps and over- and undershooting) and
then shape it into a cohesive and viewable motion picture. When she first
began to work with Flaherty, she said she was "completely baffled
by his method" and wrote to Ivens for help in understanding.
Ivens's reply was equally cryptic: "Observe, look and listen
and you'll find what he wants." Only when she was able to
view the footage through Flaherty's realm of understanding, she
said, and then decipher Flaherty's reaction while watching footage
could she gauge the direction—and ultimately, the success—of
the film. She wrote, "Had I myself gone to direct Flaherty's
story, it would have looked quite different. But working with already
filmed material, filmed under the influence of Flaherty . . . essentially
my editing would have resulted in approximately the same story and form.
This would have been inevitable because, to use the random material to
full value, the editor has to discover not only the inherent qualities of
each shot but also must know the how's and why's, the
director's reasoning behind each shot, or must know that no one
else but Flaherty would have shot such a scene." Her ability to
read the director in this way no doubt made her the best editor for
Flaherty, but more importantly, made Flaherty's films better.

Though both
The Land
and
Louisiana Story
are prime examples of Flaherty's filmmaking sensibility, much of
the beauty and emotional gravity of the films is owed to Van
Dongen's delicately focused sound and film editing. They move
beyond what film history regards as documentary (and perhaps to a degree
beyond what fiction can do as well), and into something ultimately more
lyrical. In an interview with Ben Achtenberg, Van Dongen herself resisted
the label of documentary: "To me Flaherty is
not
a documentarian; he makes it all up. He does use the documentary style
and background but, except for
The Land
, they are all, to a degree, stories. . . . They are part of our history
of filmmaking, but I do hesitate to call them documentaries. They are
Flaherty-films, and worthwhile enjoying."

—Jon Lupo

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